A significant concern with electronic commerce and with the proliferation of electronic transactions is that of privacy. Individuals, particularly American citizens, have always been suspect of the motivations and actions of their government and “Big Business.” This skepticism has given rise to a variety of privacy laws and rights enjoyed by American citizens, which remains the envy of much of the rest of the world. As electronic commerce has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, users have now become increasingly concerned with confidential information that is being gathered and collected about them. The information is being collected by lawful and unlawful enterprises and the information gathering is not exclusively limited to governments.
In some cases, the electronic information being gathered is used for illegal purposes, such as electronic identity theft. In other cases, the information is gathered for lawful purposes but is extremely annoying to users, such as when targeted and aggressive marketing tactics are used. Users are growing uncomfortable with the amount of information marketers possess today about them and many feel it is an invasion of their privacy even if the marketing is currently considered to be lawful. Moreover, even legitimate and lawful enterprises that collect confidential information about a user runs the risk of having an intruder penetrate their databases and acquiring the information for subsequent unlawful purposes.
Concerns about the government and its knowledge about its citizenry is often referred to in a derogatory sense as actions of “Big Brother” who is omnipresent and gathering information to use to its advantage when needed. The electronic age has given rise to what is now known as thousands of “Little Brothers,” who perform Internet surveillance by collecting information to form electronic profiles about a user not through human eyes or through the lens of a camera but through data collection. This form of Internet surveillance via data collection is often referred to as “dataveillance.” In a sense, thousands of “Little Brothers” or automated programs can monitor virtually every action of users over the Internet. The data about a user can be accumulated and combined with other data about the user to form electronic profiles of the users.
Even famous authors have foreseen and speculated about the problems associated with invading privacy. Consider Orwell who gave rise to the concept of an Orwellian society from the Big Brother of his novel, 1984. In that novel, Big Brother is the government, which has managed to invade privacy to the point where every dwelling was equipped with a “tele-screen” which, while providing entertainment and information access to the user, also allowed Big Brother to observe visually and audibly the occupants of the dwellings. Of course, Big Brother knew that the observed behavior of the dwelling occupants was not strictly the “true persona” of those being observed, but rather was what the “true persona” Big Brother wanted to observe. This, however, was immaterial to Big Brother because Big Brother knew that if it could foster a set of behavior that was consistently portrayed over a given period of time, then the “true persona” would begin to morph into another person that was, at its core, what the behaviors were designed to foster. Thus, Big Brother was also known as the “Thought Police,” which was very successful at conditioning the masses and eliminating the non-conformists.
In fact, users are becoming so concerned about dataveillance that a booming industry has arisen that attempts to thwart the data collection. Some examples include “anonymizers” and “spyware killers.” Anonymizers attempt to make transactions anonymous, such as by using a fictitious user name for a given transaction. Spyware Killers detect programs that self-install on a user's device and monitor Internet actions of that user and then report the monitoring information back to a marketer or other entity.
Even without anonymizers and spyware killers, users may still attempt as best they can to deter data collection by taking manually initiated evasive actions. For example, a user may turn off cookies within the browser, may refuse to register for a service that requests an email address or other confidential information, or may refuse to perform a transaction at all when the user is suspect of that transaction.
Yet even if all available techniques are adopted and taken by a user, information about the user is likely to still be successfully collected if the user engages in electronic commerce over the Internet, engages in information gathering over the Internet, or engages in downloading and installing services over the Internet. In a sense if the user engages in any Internet activity, information may be successfully collected about that user. Thus, even the most cautious Internet users are still being profiled over the Internet via dataveillance techniques from automated Litter Brothers.